Teacher Evaluation and SLPs

I’ve heard much discussion from you (SLPs) about the method that your district/state uses to evaluate your performance.  Some have said they are evaluated much like the teachers are, others said they’re not evaluated yet because the district is unsure how to do so.

In my district, all teachers, SLPs, OTs, PTs, specialists, etc. are on a 3 year “cycle”.  We are to be collecting evidence of our performance on two of those years and on a third year we must present it as proof we are effective.  As part of our “case” that we are effective, all teachers and specialists  must write a goal for themselves.  I’ve heard many of you have to write similar goals for yourselves – and are stressing about how to write it!  So, I’m going to share mine with you.

I wrote this last year, with the help of our Communication Disorders department supervisors.  They gave us a couple of examples of goals – one from each area of speech/language disorders.  I chose to go with articulation because I have a good number of students working on it and it seemed easiest to prove.

Feel free to use my goal as a jumping off point for yours!  It reads:

“In the current year, selected students receiving S/L services whose goals address articulation will make measurable progress in the production of targeted sounds.   Using a program created articulation rubric to measure progress, all students will improve at least 25% from baseline.  Data collection will be measured from the beginning of therapy 2012 and compared to data collected twice a year. “

We were only obligated to track the progress of a handful of students, not all.  If you have to do all of your students, welp, sorry – I can’t help you out there.  🙁

I’ve uploaded the rubric I used to my Google docs.  Find it here and feel free to use it!   To use the rubric, I just put an “X” in the box if the student was producing his/her sound with at least 80% accuracy in the specified context.  The total possible points on this rubric is 24.  If the student starts with 10 points on the rubric in September, in order to meet your goal, he/she would have to have improved by 25% on the rubric, or achieve 13 points (12.5 but I rounded…) by June.  Make sense?  If you have any questions, I would love to try to answer them.  Leave them in the comments!

I hope this helps some of you out!